Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Religious right or P.C. left? Quote 24

In this series of blog posts, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read each quote and guess, before doing a Web search, whether someone in the religious right or the politically correct left said it.

24.

I believe, however, that sadomasochism--both on the part of its practitioners and of the community of media voyeurs which propagates it--is not a deviation from the philosophical origins of liberalism but a realization of them.

* * *

We have become reluctant to be labelled as moral crusaders in an age when human potential has degenerated to "doing your own thing." We are conditioned to making bland observations and cynical jokes in response to obscenities of a national scale and perversity of universal magnitude. We are numbed to the point of being at home with cruelty and despair. Sadomasochism is but one more absurdity to be greeted with a blank stare. But to do that is to yield to yet another assault upon our own decency. Whatever contempt the human race may have merited in the past and may have brought upon itself, we are not destined to live by the traditions which perpetuate it. We cannot capitulate to the liberal dogma which treats as normal and neutral the volitional debasement and humiliation of one human being by another. If this is the logic of liberalism, then [our] philosophy can and must do better. Traditional philosophy would be well served by such revision.

About Me

Just another gay, rationalist, kinky, evangelical Protestant turned atheist, Libertarian papa bear trapped in a twink's body. I am trying to recruit as many people as possible into the "think for yourself" lifestyle choice so that we all can attain the special privileges of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.